I've got a lot of video clips from the month of September, but not enough time yet to put them into a single video montage. The coyote only wandered through the camera traps once all month, pausing to lap up some creek water from the little (and still shrinking) pool.
I like to remind myself that coyotes, and all other wild animals, live without agriculture. They find what they need as they travel about, roaming the Earth like Jules in Pulp Fiction wanted to do.
The gate to Rock Spring was closed all weekend, but you could still park and hike in. Pam and I were surprised and a little pissed off to encounter about a dozen mountain bike riders illegally descending the very narrow Old Mine Trail. Farther up the hill you could see where bikers have been abetting the erosion of a hillside by carving their own routes. Even on the trail, they managed to knock out a couple of wooden water bars, abetting erosion there as well.
It was smoky when I drove up on Saturday, but the air was supremely clear when we hiked up on Sunday. Despite the lack of smoke, the fire danger remained.
Speaking of fire danger, I didn't know whether to laugh or cry last night when I watched a 60 Minutes segment where a scientist put in layman's terms to the President of the United States a very clear and rational explanation of how global heating works and the dangers it presents to our way of life, and the President's response was that the Earth will cool off soon. Does he mean because winter is coming?! Is he telling us some kind of inscrutable coyote story? To see the President of the United States engaging in magical thinking to guide national policy on the defining threat of our time was just mind-blowing.
Anyway, I'm glad I was able to spend a little time in nature this weekend. This new camera location turned out to be pretty good. I'd already seen that deer had been browsing on the plants, but I couldn't tell until I saw all the camera footage that they were continuing to do so. The most obvious sign had been some Indian hemp whose leaves have been gnawed down to its tough stem, but the deer have also been eating the sedges, the ferns, and even the thorny blackberry plants.
I had to take this kestrel frame off the video footage since I didn't get a still shot. The kestrel somehow triggered the camera to shoot three still frames without getting caught, but when the video kicked in, there it was.
Before I left the area last week I placed a couple of windfall bay nuts on the log. This video clip shows who got one of them. I'd placed the other one in a nook, and it was still there. Maybe it'll sprout next spring. This time I placed several acorns on the log.
The water hole has shrunk quite a bit. I hope it lasts until the rains come. The pool was so small that I moved the camera to a new spot, thinking this viewpoint wasn't going to work much longer.
It was nice to catch the gray fox with the new camera location. If you look behind the fox you'll see some branches that I placed across an opening in the hope of steering the critters between the two rocks in the center of the frame, but the critters often wriggled through the branches instead, probably preferring their usual route.
I don't know why this honeysuckle decided to hog the camera on the final day of the month, but I wish it would have waited until after the bobcat came by to drink from the pool.
And the owl too. I've been catching this owl for a while, but the old camera location was too far away to see it very well. Unfortunately, I don't know owls well enough to do more than hazard a guess as to what this guy is: screech owl? saw-whet? spotted? I doubt I'll ever get a daytime image of it, but hopefully I'll get another chance without a honeysuckle vine obscuring the view.
* * *
